1858

Balmanno, Mrs. [Mary] "Pocahontas." In Mary Cowden Clarke. World-Noted Women; or, Types of Womanly Attributes of All Lands and Ages. New York, 1858. 283-308. Engravings by Charles Staal. Also contains two poems: "Song of Pocahontas" ["Come to the forest, warrior fair"] and "Dirge of Pocahontas" ["The graceful Mondamin lies shatter'd and broken"]. See Staal entry this year to view image. Clarke, daughter of a famous musician -- and who as a child knew Keats, Shelley, the Lambs, Leigh Hunt, and other prominent artists -- is now best remembered for her work on the Shakespeare concordance. This beautifully appointed collection (similar to other works on model women in the archive by Hays, Knapp, Child, Sarah Hale, Frank Goodrich, S. W. Williams, etc.) places Pocahontas in the company of Joan of Arc, Lady Jane Grey, Margaret of Anjou, Cleopatra, and many, many others. In her introduction (4), Clarke mentions that the Pocahontas essay was done by Mrs. Balmanno of New York. "The heart of every woman is a romance," begins Balmanno, "and its master-chord is Love. Of all the passions, it is that which exercises the strongest controul over female character. . . . Its purity and ennobling strength are beautifully exemplified in the history of the Indian Princess Pocahontas, in whose guileless and untutored heart a passion for one of the most chivalrous adventurers of America's early history, has rendered her the heroine of one of the most simple and touching stories of its golden time." "Bred in the seclusion of the forest," Pocahontas "must have turned as naturally to the commanding and chivalrous soldier as the lowly marigold to the sun." Humorous is Balmanno's description of Pocahontas from the van de Passe portrait as "bearing the same resemblance to her former self as does the airy blue-bell when pressed, dried, and pasted down in a lady's album, to its wild sisters, nodding gaily in the sunshine between the fern and fox-glove."
[illustrated; poetry; gender]
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